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So many times! So many times! Walking home on a chill Fall evening, just as the light of day faded, or on a dull cold winter day just after sunset, I’d pass homes with warm, inviting lights in the windows and smell the wafted odors of evening meals being prepared, familiar homey scents on the evening air. I would feel a great loneliness, as though I were a homeless unloved outsider with no place to go, no one to welcome me. A feeling of nostalgia would almost overpower me, as though I were remembering some wonderful home of long ago where warm kitchen smells filled the air and where a loving family awaited me.

How can I explain this feeling?

Actually, I was walking home to a fine house, full of people, my family, where a good supper was being prepared. Where did it come from, this feeling of being so alone, so outside of the warmth and comfort of a home and good food? I can only say that all too often when I did arrive home I would be greeted with questioning of where I had been and why I was so long away from home. I would feel defensive, as though somehow I was at fault for something. Looking back, I suppose I did not feel part of that loving, extended family of which I was a member. I felt I was alone. At such a time, I really did not feel loved – wanted.

Perhaps it was simply my empathetic nature experiencing what it would be like if I were poor, hungry, homeless, friendless?

The same feeling will still creep over me in similar circumstances, but now I can intellectualize it. I am wanted, loved, well housed, well fed, actually experiencing God’s bounty in many ways.

I am a loner, really, always have been. I do have friends. I do have family. I do have plenty. But I am quite alone mostly, never intimately connected to them. It is an anomaly I cannot explain, even to myself.